6 Life Enhancing Benefits from Keeping a Dream Journal
Dream Journaling benefits, what are they? What can you gain from improving your dream recall, writing your dreams down when you would much rather go back to sleep, then taking the time to reflect on them?
Well, there’s quite a few benefits actually, and today, I’m going to talk about 6 of them in this blog.
1. Ideas, Inspiration and Solutions
There have been countless accounts of scientists searching for the answer to a problem, writers seeking a plot twist, composers searching for the perfect chord, and artists questing for inspiration – all of whom received answers in dreams that resulted in some of the greatest discoveries and creations in history.
Albert Einstein claimed to receive dream guidance when pondering a difficult mathematical equation. Physicist Neils Bohr saw the model for the atom in a dream. Paul McCartney, The Beatles, got the tune for ‘Yesterday’ from a dream.
By keeping a consistent dream practice and writing documenting our dreams in a Dream Journal, we are more likely to capture these ideas, inspirations and solutions.
2. Healing & Improving Mental Health
There has been a surge in numbers over recent years of people ready to ‘take the bull by the horns’ and do the inner work required to heal and turn their life around.
dream journaling helps us to identify and heal:
- Past wounds that need healing so they don’t affect our waking behaviour and decisions
- Patterns of self-defeating and self-sabotaging behaviour
- Fears which we might not be consciously aware of that are holding us back
- They help us to heal and grieve after the passing of a loved one
- Align ourselves with the best version of ourselves
- Uncover our true passions and desires
- Uncover our life purpose
3. Complimentary to Other Therapies
If you are undergoing some type of psychological therapy, alternative therapy and/or you’re on a path of self-discovery, spiritual journey or Shadow Work, having a Dream Practice greatly assists the uncovering and healing process of inner therapies.
I often have other therapists refer their clients to me to assist them in uncovering what their dream is trying to bring to the dreamer’s attention. Which then assists the therapist to know what to focus on with the dreamer during their sessions.
If you’re a therapist and you’re interested in my services to assist your clients, contact me via email to find out about my Therapist Collab Offers.
4. Access to a Wealth of Information
Our dreams reveal information to us when the information is needed.
Apart from the list of information about ourselves we can gain from a dream, we can also gain information about the world and the people around us.
Dreams can bring our attention to details we may have seen in our peripherals, or details we even saw or heard, but didn’t take further notice of.
These details may have helped us realise someone hasn’t been acting in our best interest or is being deceitful, and although we noticed the clues during our waking life, our people pleasing ego ignored and suppressed that information.
Or, maybe we didn’t notice how much someone was acting in our best interest and we didn’t show them the gratitude and appreciation we would have expressed if we had noticed.
There are also dreams that prepare us for some news we will be receiving the following day, these dreams are known as precognitive dreams.
There are also prophetic dreams which are dreams that tell us about things that may happen in a few weeks or months from now that we might want to prepare for or prevent.
It is difficult to know if a dream is precognitive or prophetic until the event actually happens. Some believe (including myself), déjà vus are a result of this phenomenon.
It can be surprising how many of us actually have precognitive and prophetic dreams. We can uncover these by recording our dreams whilst also keeping a day journal so we can look back and cross reference between the two.
5. Divine Messages
It’s an age-old fact that God speaks to us in dreams.
If you ever have a dream that has a dream symbol appearing in threes, such as 3 dogs, 3 planets, or 3 mountains, it’s possible this is an indication the dream contains a message from the divine.
Divine dreams do tend to be very symbolic, abstract and vivid. They certainly don’t speak in “daytime language” as Gail Godwin says.
6. Clarity, Guidance, Support & Reassurance
The biggest and most consistent benefit of keeping a Dream Practice is clarity, guidance, support and reassurance.
We can gain clarity on what goals we want to set for ourselves, guidance on what decisions to make, support when our lives are hectic, and reassurance that we’re on the right track.
